Scaramucci Is In. Priebus Is Out

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s new communications director, immediately made clear that he wouldn’t be able to work with Reince Priebus, who was dismissed Friday as the chief of staff.

Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

It makes some sense that, after Anthony Scaramucci, the President’s
incoming communications director, told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that he was setting the F.B.I. on Reince Priebus, the White House chief
of staff, the two men couldn’t work together any longer. But it bespeaks
the peculiar logic of the Trump White House that it was Priebus, and not Scaramucci, who had to go. There wasn’t even a pretense of chastising the new man. Scaramucci had, in his screed to Lizza, said that he
would “get to” whoever had leaked information about him, adding, “Reince
Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very
shortly.” The President proved Scaramucci right less than a day later; Priebus
was out late Friday afternoon. This doesn’t make Scaramucci a prophet,
or even a model for how to handle the President. There have been plenty
of theories about how to do that—cajole, reason, beg, flatter, remind
him that he’s your father—and none have proved entirely successful.
Scaramucci is just a guy who knew that someone was being picked on, and
jumped in. Now the rest of us can sit back and see how long it takes for
someone to pick on Scaramucci.

Trump, while leaving an event for law-enforcement officers on Long
Island, said that Priebus was “a good man,” but that the person he had
chosen to replace him, retired Marine General John Kelly, the Secretary
of Homeland Security, was “a star.” There had been reports in recent
days that Trump wanted a general to manage his office; generals appeal
to him, perhaps because he believes, accurately or not, that they are
tough individuals who nonetheless will follow orders—his orders, that is—or
maybe just because he likes uniforms. The way that Trump seems to
imagine the character of people in uniform—whether the military, the
police, or the Boy Scouts—is in many ways itself an insult to those who
wear one, and among the ways that he continues to damage the political
culture. (Before the Priebus announcement, Charlie Savage, of the
Times, tweeted that the President’s Long Island speech would be
remembered for this line about the police: “When you see these thugs
being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon—you just see them thrown in,
rough—I said, please don’t be too nice.”) In this case, Trump may also
have been charmed by Kelly’s enthusiasm for the President’s immigration
agenda; Barbara Starr, of CNN, who has covered the Pentagon for years,
said that her sources told her that, with regard to Trump, Kelly had
become something of a true believer. Then again, Attorney General Jeff
Sessions has been the truest believer of all, and he has been derided by
the President as not only weak but “VERY weak.”

Priebus was supposed to be a link to the institutional G.O.P., and thus
a stabilizing presence. The problem with this logic is that, as the
health-care debate has shown, the Republican Party itself is, at the
moment, highly unstable; it has its own bouts of irrationality,
tantrums, and extremes, independent of Trump. That doesn’t mean that
Priebus’s departure won’t bring about changes; it just makes their
nature harder to predict. What is Trump going to ask Kelly to do, and
whom will he ask him to fire? And what kind of reward does Scaramucci
get now from those cowed into deferring to him rather than leaving the
Administration? It’s not really Scaramucci’s temper and crudity that
anyone has to fear, though; it’s Trump’s. The President will look for someone else to
ratify his anger if he gets tired of the current team. One might ask to
what end all the yelling and firing is directed—where is the part where
America is made great again? But, in the Trump White House, bullying is
its own reward.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.